from the people-being-dumb,-thinking-we-are-dumb,-making-dumb-decisions dept

Hi there. I'm Chris
O'Donnell and I've been reading Techdirt since the very early days,
maybe even as far back as the last millennium. My favorite posts this
week all share a theme, they are examples of people being dumb, people
thinking we are dumb, and companies making dumb decisions that are
counter to their financial interests.

Since companies are now people, we can start with this example of Swedish
rights holders shutting down a fan run translation site. Instead of
recognizing that fans are adding value to their products, for free, the
rights holders made their work less accessible to non-native speakers
by shutting down the fan site. Then they doubled down on the bad will
by getting the police to react with necessary force.

No post about dumb would be complete without the RIAA. However, in
this case the dumb actually falls more on Pandora, who are still
struggling to get out from under their dumb decision in 2009 to accept
ridiculously high royalty rates that only applied to them. The post
also features a conservative think tank and an analyst claiming that a
market where prices are set by a 3 judge panel is a free market.
Combine all that with the the RIAA being involved and its almost too
much dumb in one place.

Congress
is another guaranteed entrant into any carnival of dumb. This
week's poster child for idiocy is RIAA lapdog Marsha Blackburn. She is
dumb enough to believe the propaganda fed to her by the RIAA and
others, dumb enough to publish an op-ed repeating the propaganda, and
apparently dumb enough to think it will convince anybody to side with
the RIAA.

Game developer Eidos doubled down on dumb by using DRM to lock out paying users
of the newest version of Deus Ex if they download the game to a
jailbroken iOS device. Of course, there is no warning before purchase
that the $6.99 you are spending will be wasted if your device is
jailbroken.

Chris ODonnell’s Comments

Different cases, but the big guys here succeed in getting legal fees from the the legal guy on a stupid lawsuit, yet when Techdirt (the little guy) is the target of just as stupid a lawsuit, the court can't find any reason to slap the hands of the big guy by awarding legal fees to Techdirt.

Hey Mike Masnick - are you still living with javascript disabled in your browsers? Wondering if that is even possible is today's .js driven web world. Because more and more javascript seems like a security weaknesses.

What I've learned, or realized, is that there is nothing on TV worth the effort of a new streaming service, or even Bit Torrent. If it's not conveniently available on Netflix or Prime I just pass and do something else.

As long as lawyers keep taking these hopeless cases they'll keep happening. And since there seems to be no downside at all for the lawyers, I expect to keep reading about these cases on Techdirt for years to come.

Eventually some enterprising company will realize that there is a market for a service that that provides centralized access to all your favorite streams, and one easy to digest monthly price. They'll suggest you'll save time, money, and maybe even bandwidth on your incoming Internet cable. They might even decide to call this new service cable TV.

There is no way they have any research that says consumers will pay $30 to $50 to rent a movie at home. This is #FakeProgress, designed to fail so the industry can claim there is no market for early release windows for home viewing.